


Moments on Mandalore

by Tathrin



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars: Legacy of the Force Series - Aaron Allston & Troy Denning & Karen Traviss, Star Wars: Republic Commando Series - Karen Traviss
Genre: Family, M/M, Mandalorian
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-30
Updated: 2012-08-30
Packaged: 2017-11-13 04:24:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,635
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/499444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tathrin/pseuds/Tathrin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A series of short one-shots set on Mandalore, revolving around the Medrit-Vasur family.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. A Day at the Bar

“Hey, Beviin!” someone called. He turned to look across the tapcaf. “Mandalore got any problem with us accepting _government_ contracts?” A handful of Mando’ade ambled towards him, led by a bulky figure in red armor.

Goran Beviin set his drink down. “Mandlore doesn’t care what contracts you take,” he said truthfully. He’d gotten used to being Fett’s voice when their Mandalore was an absent one before the Vong. Now that absence wasn’t Fett’s choice, but Beviin was still his stand-in dirtside. It wasn’t a hard job. Fett wasn’t a micromanager, at least not when it came to government. Not that Mandos needed that sort of oversight, anyway.

Or accepted it.

“Even GA ones?” asked a young man in blue armor.

“Doesn’t care,” Beviin reiterated. He took another quaff of _buy’ce gal_.

“Daala’s all right,” someone else said; an older Mando in green armor with his feet up on a table. He had a nasty burn scar along one side of his face that twisted his features, but the expression on the other side was pleasant enough.

“Pays promptly,” grinned a graying woman in yellow sitting at the next table.

“Chummy with the Mandalore, too,” added a black-armored man from the other side of the tapcaf. He was scouring marks into the table with a long knife. Tables—and chairs and walls and stools—in Mandalorian watering holes were fair game. Leave a few extra credit chits or some gifts in barter now and then, and you could do pretty much whatever you wanted with the furnishings. They were always simple, utilitarian, and easy to replace.

“Yeah, Daala’s a _jate dala_ ,” the Mando in green said. He laughed at his own play on words. Some of the others joined in, but most groaned. The yellow-armored Mando threw her mug at him. It was empty; no sane Mando would waste _tihaar_.

“ _Copaani mirshmure’cye, burc’ya?_ ” she asked him, her tone half-annoyance, half-amusement. He dodged, chuckling, and waved for the bartender to bring her a new drink on his tab as a peace offering.

“Only if you’re doing the smacking, beautiful,” he said and winked.

She took the glass with a grin. “ _Chakaar_ ,” she said companionably.

He shrugged. “Not on a regular basis,” he protested, aping petulance. There was general laughter to that one.

“So Daala’s got some jobs on the table, huh?” the Mando with the knife asked the red-armored one who was still standing at Beviin’s table, drawing the discussion back to its original point.

“Yeah,” said Red, “just wanted to clear it before we negotiated price.” He grinned predatorily. Daala would get her Mandos, but she’d pay well for the privilege. That was how things should be.

Beviin shook his head. “Well, Mandalore doesn’t care who’s paying you, so long as you don’t embarrass us by forgetting to overcharge.” He winked. There were a few chuckles. No one ever paid too _much_ for Mandalorian assistance. They just paid for the _best_.

The young fellow in blue armor spoke up: “What if it’s a Jedi job?” he asked.

“Charge more,” said someone else before Beviin could. He grinned and nodded.

“Be a shame to vape Solo,” commented a Mando in blue-streaked-white. A few heads nodded. They all would if they had to, but Beviin agreed, it would be a shame.

“Yeah, she’s a good kid,” said a Mando about half Jaina’s age.

“For an _arutii_ ,” added another.

“And a _jetii_.”

Everyone nodded. A Mando with violet armor and vine tattoos climbing up his neck shook his head heavily. “And she was so useful, too,” he muttered, looking mournfully at a row of corked bottles against the back wall. Everyone laughed.

“Sorry Carid,” said one of the young Mandos standing behind Red. “We’ll try not to break your pet _jetii_ -bottle-opener, but no promises.”

Someone else slapped Carid on the back, the sound a hollow _thunk_ against his metal plates. “Don’t worry about it,” the other Mando told the kid, “he needs the exercise anyway. Getting soft.”

Carid slammed his fist into the other’s gut hard enough to double him over despite his _beskar_. “Yeah,” Carid agreed happily, “soft as a baby’s _shebs_.” He leaned down and hauled his victim back to his feet, both of them chuckling.

“Not a baby _I_ want to change,” muttered the man with the burn scar. There were shouts of agreement. Carid tried to look wounded.

Beviin enjoyed the sense of _jatne manda_. If they could just get that _osik_ out of the atmo, life would pretty much be all right. He raised his drink in a toast. “Oya mando,” he said.

The words were a roar as the rest of the bar joined in. “Oya Mando!”

 _Elek_ , thought Beviin, _ib’tuur jatne tuur..._

 _…ash’ah kyr’amur._ He grinned and finished his drink.


	2. Tinkering

The stars were always bright over Mandalore at night. With little artificial illumination to clutter the fields and forests of the sparsely populated planet there wasn't enough light pollution to blot out the stars like there was on more civilized worlds. Tonight one of those stars was extra bright, orange and flaring as it receded speedily into the dark sky. Down below on a small homestead that doubled as both farm and smithy, a man stood in the doorway of the vheh'yaim and watched it leave. He was average in height and thickly muscled with graying hair and had the kind of lined face acquired through a great deal of strife or a great deal of laughter. He wore armor—a blue breastplate, dangerous looking crushgaunts, heavy boots, a few other scattered pieces—but leaned against the doorframe casually, as if this was how he dressed when relaxing.

“You can’t fix everyone, you know.”

The figure in the door turned to look behind him at the source of the voice. The speaker was another human male, although he was distinctly taller. He was a hard-faced man, tanned and scarred, with unevenly-cropped short white hair. The exposed planes of his skin were dotted with small, faded scars as if he did a lot of metal-working without full armor. The bits of armor that he was wearing, though, sat on him as effortlessly as if it were a second skin or perhaps even a first; the flesh beneath it the artificial covering. He was smirking slightly, but the mocking twinkle in his eyes was kind.

The first man turned away with a snort and a smirk of his own. “Don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said. “You’re the tinkerer, Med.” The current speaker’s name was Goran Beviin and he was the de facto second-in-command of the Mandalore—the man, not the planet. He was also probably the closest thing that poor barve had to a friend. Beviin was a bounty hunter and mercenary of the highest order, but that was a matter of course; he was Mandalorian, after all.

The other man was Mandalorian as well, although his helmeted visage wasn’t as familiar off-world. Even without the trademark **T** -visored helmets, the armor proclaimed their cultural identity almost as well as a bas’kad or a shuk’orok to the face would. And the armor worn by these two proclaimed it even better than most, because every piece of beskar they wore had been forged personally by the taller man, Medrit Vasur, an expert smith and weaponier.

He worked with beskar the way more civilized artists did clay or musical notes and every piece that passed through his smithy was an exquisitely functional work of art. He was also, as Goran has said, a tinkerer; like all true artists, Medrit never seemed to believe that a piece was finished until it was perfect, and _perfect_ was a transient state that rarely lasted beyond the cooling process.

“You work with people the same way I do metal, Gor,” the taller man said. “Always trying to fix them. Sometimes you can’t. Sometimes the metal’s too old, too cracked, and too damn set in its habits.”

Goran grinned over his shoulder. “That ever stop you, cyar’ika?”

Medrit snorted and joined his riduur in the doorway and looked up at the stars and the last flickering glow from the vanishing engines of the _Slave I_. “Sure,” he said. “Can’t make good beskar’gam from osik metal.”

Goran chuckled. “Right,” he said. “Just throw it in the scrap pile and use a new slab, that it?”

“Exactly.”

“Because I’ve never seen you pounding away at a stubborn block of metal, swearing ‘til you’ve gone Wroonian in the face, promising dire vengeance upon its birth mine if it doesn’t give in and yield to your sense of design.”

“Nope,” said Medrit, “never.”

“Didn’t think so,” said Goran. “Me neither.”

They watched the stars for a few minutes, then Medrit snorted. “Well, you can stand out here and woolgather. I’m going back in.” He slapped Goran’s shoulder-plate in a friendly way that would have knocked an unarmored man to the ground. “Dinua was baking uj’alayi and it should be just about done by now.”

“What?” Goran turned around. “Uj cake? Why didn’t you say that sooner?” He hurried after Medrit into the house and then followed his nose towards the kitchen. “Useless di’kut,” he muttered affectionately at the smith and went over to tease their grandchildren, both of whom were wearing enough uj’alayi batter that it was clear they’d been helping their mother cook.

“Oh sit down,” Dinua scolded them all. “If you make me drop the cake, I’ll be forced to shoot the lot of you and I’m far too tired to be dragging around corpses at this hour.”

“Sorry, buir,” the children chorused. Goran popped on his most innocent expression and all four of them meekly settled around the table. There was nothing like uj cake to bring family together...

...mostly because it was too sticky to separate yourselves afterward.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would like to do more of these, and hopefully some day I will, but honestly between Lucas's "ha ha I just fucked-over the entirety of Mandalorian canon and you will never know how these plot threads end" and Disney's "yeah whatever we have new canon now" I just feel a bit burned-out on my poor Mando'ade right now. It's hard to write them and not feel depressed (and I don't want to just write angsty vehicles for the author's misery fic about these wonderful characters they deserve better than that). So if inspiration strikes, maybe I'll do more snippets. But for now, this is all I've got in me. Sorry!


End file.
